Dead Man Walking
by Team Jem Carstairs
Summary: John does not take losing Sherlock well and takes his return even worse. Set to "Dead Man Walking" by the Script. Reichenbach fic.


**This is going to be angsty, so be warned. It's set to the lyrics of the song "Dead Man Walking" by the Script, which I highly recommend listening to while you read this. Please review!**

**Disclaimer: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are credited with Sherlock BBC, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the original creator of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are the fabulous and very sexy portrayers of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.**

The Fall. If asked about it later, John would never refer to it as anything else. It was not _Moriarty's defeat, _it was not a _victory for the side of the angels,_ and it most certainly was not _Sherlock's death._ It was the Fall. Sherlock was not dead but fallen. He was an angel after all, wasn't he? _Not a hero, not an angel_, not anything but a brilliant mortal, he said, but he was wrong. His halo may have been crooked and his wings didn't work but he was an angel, choosing to fall rather than suffer any longer. Milton would have been proud.

No, Sherlock didn't die that day, but John did. John had been nearly dead when he met Sherlock, with his limp and his depression and the nightmares that kept him up to watch the stars. He came alive again when he moved into 221B, more alive than he had ever been, even before the war. Even during it.

He was alive and it was glorious, but with the fall of the greatest man he'd ever met, all that died again. The nightmares were worse, shadowy horrors at every turn. The depression was worse, strengthened by grief and anger. The limp came back, and so did the tremor in his hand. He heard Sherlock's voice when he was so tired he couldn't do anything but pray for death. In a way he was already dead, a true dead man walking.

He remembers it every night. He remembers and wonders if he hadn't gone to Mrs. Hudson, if he was cleverer and realized it was a trick, if he knew Moriarty could play him the way Sherlock could play the violin, what would be different? Would Sherlock be alive? Would he have to die so Sherlock could live? He would have done it in a heartbeat. _Did he think the same about me?_

Sherlock was standing on the roof. He was talking on the phone and John was hearing words, but how? The words were all English, but when Sherlock put them together, they didn't make sense. How could he be leaving a note? What? He was standing and then he wasn't, he was falling, and John couldn't move because shock and fear had slipped lead into his bones.

But then he had to run. He had to, even after getting knocked down, because Sherlock was just lying there (_Why won't he get up?)_ and there was blood and there were spectators and it was Sherlock bloody Holmes. He was John's friend and flatmate and sometimes John thought maybe he loved him, and Lestrade was wrong, he was a good man as well as a great one and _he still wasn't moving._

John took his hand, that cold, slender hand that had so often clutched a violin and bow or a phone, and slid his fingers up to check his pulse. The slender, pale wrist did not thrum with the rhythm of a heart pounding and that frightened John more than anything, because how could he not have a pulse? Every living thing had a pulse. That was when it hit him: there was no living thing in his arms. There was only an empty shell. There was a body stripped clean of all arrogance and cleverness. There was a broken man. There was a fallen angel.

There were people taking pictures with their mobiles and John didn't even have it in him to ask them to please stop, to show some respect for the dead or for the army doctor who was starting to cry over the body. He didn't understand why anyone could possibly think Sherlock was a fraud. _No one could be that clever,_ he had said, but he was wrong, he could. He was clever and you can't fake that. _No one could fake being such an annoying dick all the time_, and John knew that was only half the truth. Someone could, but not Sherlock. Never Sherlock.

That was the moment John stopped expecting a miracle. He hoped, because he could never stop hoping, because Sherlock was a proper genius and he could find a way around this, he had to, because the man would outlive God trying to have the last word. With a shuddering breath, not caring anymore if anyone got a picture, he leaned over and gently laid a kiss on Sherlock's mouth. It was soft and cool, plush lips tasting of copper. It wasn't meant to be romantic– John knew he wasn't gay– but Sherlock defied all labels, didn't he, and John wanted to say goodbye in the only way he could think of. He wanted to say something but his throat was blocked up with tears and all the words he should have said.

_It's all my fault_, he thought miserably. _All my fault_. There was a way to say it in Latin, a phrase he used to know, but he couldn't remember it just then. If only he had known, if he was half as clever as Sherlock, if he wasn't so quick-tempered and poor with words… He yelled at Sherlock, called him a machine, but he wasn't, he was the most human… human being John had ever known. He rushed off to Mrs. Hudson, which would have been admirable if he wasn't so _stupid_ to know it was a trick. If he had stayed… Would Sherlock be alive?

John was not a religious man. He never had been, not really, and being in the war only cemented that disbelief. Still, the night Sherlock… fell, he went to a hotel– he couldn't go back to Baker Street– and thought about it. If there were a Heaven, Sherlock would be there. But then John had to laugh, because Heaven was meant to be peaceful, and peace just out-an-out irritated Sherlock, who would no doubt grow extraordinarily bored and irritable in a place with no crime. There would be no moving on for the world's only consulting detective. He was broken, gone, one of the fallen.

Why was it only okay to refer to Sherlock as _fallen_, but John had no problem acknowledging that he himself was _dead_?

**Three Years Later**

Sherlock was home. He had returned as soon as he could after the death of Colonel Sebastian Moran, walked right up to the door of the flat and knocked. And kept knocking. No one answered. Mrs. Hudson– who had been one of the two people who knew he wasn't dead, Molly being the other– regretfully informed him that John had only returned to the flat once to collect his things and then left for another little flat in a different part of town. She didn't know where, but that didn't matter, because Sherlock was like a homing pigeon, only his home was John.

And he did. He found his blogger. John's face when he yanked the door opened– it appeared to jam slightly– was the most beautiful thing Sherlock had seen in three years. He looked shell-shocked, like he couldn't trust his eyes, like he had seen something utterly miraculous– an angel, perhaps. But after the shock had worn away, it was replaced by the most gorgeous joy, exultation and euphoria scribbled in every line of his face. He pulled the detective close and held him for a moment. Sherlock buried his face in the ash-blonde silk of John's hair and pressed his spidery hands to the doctor's back, reveling in their twin heartbeats.

The perfect moment could hardly last forever, though. As though given an electric shock John pulled roughly away, tearing himself away from the other man. Sherlock felt cold where John's body no longer touched his and he was hurting because he didn't think he'd be pushed away. With an anger that he had only summoned once or twice, John pulled back a fist and executed a magnificent hook to Sherlock's jaw, sending him sprawling. He called the detective all sorts of unsavory names, shouting at him for leaving and not telling John he was alive. _You had bloody well explain_, he said last, turning on his heel and stomping into his flat, leaving Sherlock hesitating on the stoop.

Not telling John he was alive, watching him grieve and suffer from afar, had killed Sherlock. It tore a hole in his heart that wouldn't really heal. It hurt, so Sherlock did his best to patch it up, but he wasn't good at fixing himself and the stitches were rough and uneven. He knew it could never really heal like that, but it was better than nothing. Seeing John again made him think that the doctor's careful hands might be able to ease the ache he felt, even out the stitches so that the wound could heal properly, but instead he tore the hole right open again until Sherlock thought his blue silk shirt would be permanently blood-stained.

Rubbing his chest with a slight grimace, Sherlock followed John into the flat and shut the door behind him. Taking a seat in the living room he proceeded to explain how he had faked his death, as well as what he had been doing in the three years since he had last seen John. When he was finished, John just looked at him a little sadly, like he wasn't sure what to make of the whole tale and didn't know how to breach the distance between them.

That was the strangest bit for Sherlock. He was never close to anyone but John, but he and John had been absurdly close once upon a time. Now that had all changed. Sherlock wondered how he could be in the same room with someone yet feel as though they were a million miles apart. He wondered how many girlfriends John had gone through. He had missed John's fortieth birthday; whom did he spend it with? There was everything and nothing to say.

He suddenly felt absurdly ashamed of himself. How could he think everything would be all right, just like that? He _knew_ it was hurting John; right after the fall, when he was on the ground faking his death, his eyes were open. He saw John mourn for him, felt the pressure of a mouth on his own, felt a hand gently squeezing his. He knew John loved him, knew they were two halves to the same whole, but he didn't know how to fix the mess he had caused.

He looked over at John and saw the anger, pain, exhaustion, loneliness, and a little bit of relief on his face, all at once, and it hit him so hard in the chest it might have been a death-blow. He might as well be dead if John couldn't forgive him. Would he even want to move back into the Baker Street flat? _Does he wish I really had died that day?_

His heart broke all over again, wondering if John was really gone. If he had lost him forever. He didn't think he could bear having to be gone for three years only to return to the one person he had really cared about not wanting him back. He was a master of deductive science, he could read John like a book, and he knew that he was far from forgiven. There was someone he was involved with, a girl younger than him who thought she could fix his broken heart, and he had been seeing her for a while but she wasn't serious. There was someone else. There was someone who had taken over the role Sherlock had previously played in John's life, someone who was a full-time commitment, someone who spent a lot of time with John. Someone who should have been Sherlock.

Sherlock didn't know if John wished he had died that day, but all of sudden, that was what _he_ wished.


End file.
